Nonradiative transfer of excitation in coherent decay from a Gaussian atomic distribution

Coherent decay of a spherically symmetric ensemble of initially resonantly phased two-level atoms is studied in the scalar photon model, in the continuum and Markov approximations. Emphasis is on the Gaussian distribution, where nonradiative transfer of excitation to excited states orthogonal to the initial one is found to be nonzero even in the limit of short wavelength, whether or not the scalar kernel is replaced by its real part. Numerical results are compared to known values for the uniform distribution.